I hate spam, I hate it in email, I hate it in paper mail, I hate it in instant messaging, I hate it in forums – I just hate it.

For a long time, I have struggled with comment spam on this site up until I installed Akismet, which has been my knight in shining armour to help combat comment spam.

Over the last year, the rate that this site has been getting spammed has increased every single month, without fail – relentlessly. The spam statistics for the Akismet service indicates that the rate they are receiving and filtering spam has also been increasing.

At the moment, the graph doesn’t show any particular sign that the rate of spam has slowed at all. For some reason though, the rate that this site is receiving spam has definitely decreased. Over the last few months, I would delete between 350 and some times over 1000 per day while at the moment it is averaging a number less than 200.

That got me wondering what has changed around these parts, nothing in particular. I’m still running the same blogging software, still using Akismet to filter spam on the site and the search engine rankings of the site haven’t decreased such that it might make it a less likely target for spammers.

Is it possible that enough people are combating spam efficiently these days that at least some portion of the spamming community have called it quits? I don’t know if there is a way for anyone to answer that question with any sort of certainty however I can only hope that it might be the case.

Die filthy spammers, die.